ENGL Deployment Monitor 2.0 BETA - Oh yeah!

After months of hard work, we're days away from handing over Deployment Monitor 2.0 to BETA testers. We're extremely proud of what we've achieved and here's an overview of the new features.

Modern framework

With Deployment Monitor 2, we've recreated the product from scratch. We took all the good things in Deployment Monitor 1.x and added a modern twist. The Web Service, which talks to the database and does all the hard work, has been designed with REST API methods that we intend to document and expose for your own use. The Web Console, which is the browser front-end to Deployment Monitor, has been developed to include responsive HTML5 components.

SQL Server support

Deployment Monitor 2 supports both local and remote SQL Server connections. We've also removed the requirement for SQL Server Express, for example a remote connection to an instance on SQL Server 2016 SP1.

Live and History views

We've updated the Live and History views with customisable columns and ordering. As part of this, ENGL Imaging Toolkit customers have the ability to add multiple ENGL Build-data Attributes as columns.

The Live and History data grids will now dynamically refresh whenever there are changes on the Deployment Monitor server. This makes for a more fluid experience without full screen refreshes. As part of the dynamic connection between the Web Console and the server, actions such View log files, will enable/disable depending on whether a machine build has sent log files or not. We've also made it possible for you to remote control ZENworks devices from both the Live and History views.

Detailed status

The detailed status window gives you a report of all status updates received for a given machine.

Log viewer

With Deployment Monitor 2, it is now possible to define multiple log files that will be collected as the machine is being deployed. Additional log files to be collected can be defined in Deployment Monitor settings. Not only can you specify a list of log files but you can specify whether the log file is uploaded to the Deployment Monitor server always or only when a deployment error is detected.

The log viewer now includes tabs for each log file. ENGL Imaging Toolkit deployments will always collect Zim and Ztoolkit log files during status updates, which now appear in a single tab named Imaging Toolkit. Errors and warnings are highlighted and all files for the selected machine build can be downloaded as a ZIP.

Imaging Toollkit support

Imaging Toolkit 10.0.6 includes support for Deployment Monitor 2.0 BETA. If you're running an earlier version of Imaging Toolkit, it's time to plan the upgrade so you're ready for Deployment Monitor 2.0.

What's next?

Whilst BETA 1 is focused on deployments using ENGL Imaging Toolkit, in the next BETA release we'll support non-Imaging Toolkit deployments. Whether you're running ZENworks, System Center, or Ghost Solution Suite, you'll be able to monitor your OS deployments using Deployment Monitor 2.0.

Get involved

You've asked for the features and we've delivered. Time for you to help us. Your feedback is important to us. If you can spare a few hours a week to test Deployment Monitor 2 and report issues to us, please register your interest here. We have a limit to the number of BETA testers we can accept, so please sign up now.